Red Joan (40 page)

Cautiously she slips her hand into the box and takes them out. Ah, she thinks, old photographs. Her hands are clumsy in the gloves but she is careful with the delicate paper. She flicks through the pile, just to verify absolutely that there is nothing incriminating, and almost at once a picture of a boy catches her eye. It is Leo as a child. It must be. He is perhaps six years old, skinny, with his head tilted and sunlight flashing from his spectacles, standing under a tree. His features are less pronounced but he still looks so like the man she once loved that her eyes burn. Shot, she thinks, and the word explodes numbly in her mind.

She crouches down on the carpet and flicks through the rest of the photographs. There are not many. In each one, the same boy looks straight at the camera, unsmiling but curious. It is Leo's expression exactly. In some of them, he is standing with a man whom Joan assumes to be Uncle Boris, Leo's father. He looks old. She did not expect him to be so old. She wonders if there will be some of Sonya as a child, but then she remembers that Sonya's childhood was spent elsewhere, and does not sound like the sort of childhood which would lend itself to cheery snapshots. There are numbers scribbled on the backs of the photographs, which at first Joan assumes to be dates. The first photograph reads 30.06.46, which would mean it was taken three and a half years ago. She frowns. Not a date then. Something else.

There is a small pile of larger, more faded pictures at the bottom of the box, which Joan recognises as having been taken at Cambridge while they were undergraduates. Why has Sonya never shown her these before? She recognises herself in a few of them—such a strange feeling to be transported in time like this—and there are several of the whole group. There is one of William delivering a speech on a stage at one of the marches, and another in which he is kissing Rupert on the mouth, not a chaste, joking kiss, but a proper kiss, two men locked in a passionate embrace. Joan stares at this picture for a few seconds, wondering how it was that she never guessed at the time. Why did nobody ever tell her—Leo or Sonya or someone else—when they all knew anyway and were so accustomed to it that there is even a photograph of it?

She puts the photographs back in the box and replaces it in the corner of the wardrobe. She knows Sonya will not come back. She has gone for good, without even saying goodbye. She must have thought she was in real danger to leave so suddenly that she could not do that, as otherwise, surely, she'd have made some effort to get a message to Joan, even if only to warn her. Wouldn't she?

At this, Joan feels a sudden jolt of fear as she realises that this is it now. She is alone. She is alone and they have taken Max. It's only a matter of time before he realises. And then there will be nobody to turn to, nobody she can ask for help. Except, perhaps, William. She sits perfectly still. She cannot move. Her legs are pulled into her chest and her arms are curled around her knees but she knows she cannot stay here. What if they come for Sonya and they find her here instead? What if someone saw her come in? She stands up and hurries to the bedroom door.

But then a thought occurs to her. She turns back to the wardrobe and extracts a single photograph from the cardboard box. She slips it into the pocket of her fur coat, and as she does she feels a terrible flush of shame at the knowledge of what she might do with it.

 

For immediate attention:

 

I am anxious to establish the present whereabouts of a certain Sonya WILCOX née GALICH, her husband, James WILCOX, and their daughter Katherine (a.k.a. Katya) WILCOX of The Warren, Firdene, Norfolk. The aforementioned were the subjects of an interrogation approximately two years ago on 5 October, 1947. We have reason to believe that their house, The Warren, is at present untenanted, and no forwarding instructions have been given for correspondence to be sent on. We also believe that in January of this year Sonya WILCOX mentioned to her neighbour, Mrs. FLASK, that she intended to visit her son in Switzerland. We had been unaware of the existence of a son, but Mrs. FLASK informed us that he was born in 1940 and is named Tomas, and he lives with his grandfather in Switzerland. It is, of course, possible that she has indeed travelled to Switzerland and not returned.

I should be very grateful if you could make discreet enquiries as to where Mr. and Mrs. WILCOX have gone, and if possible what her intentions were regarding her future movements.

 

Yours sincerely

 

The name is illegible, a blue-inked scrawl across the bottom of the paper.

‘Did you ever hear from her again?'

‘No,' Joan whispers. ‘Never.' She does not look up. She is staring at the piece of paper. ‘But I don't understand this. She didn't have a son. She never mentioned—'

Nick groans suddenly and sinks his head into his hands. ‘Of course she did.'

‘What? Nick?'

He shakes his head but he does not reply. Instead he turns to Ms. Hart. ‘You knew, didn't you? You knew all of this at the start.'

Ms. Hart glances across at Mr. Adams, and then back to Nick. She nods. ‘It's our job to know these things.'

‘This is cruel. Can't you see she's old? This could kill her.'

‘What could?' Joan asks.

Mr. Adams interrupts. ‘With respect, your mother is charged with a very serious offence. If we had told her this earlier, it would have compromised any information she might have chosen to tell us.'

‘Told me what earlier?' Joan asks again, and suddenly the room falls silent. Nobody speaks. ‘Will someone please tell me what you're all talking about?'

Ms. Hart looks at Joan and then at Nick. Her look is questioning.

‘Oh, just tell her,' Nick says suddenly. ‘She deserves to know.'

Ms. Hart's voice is soft. Her hand is on Joan's arm, and even though Joan is listening and listening, straining to understand, and she can see Ms. Hart's mouth moving, her mind has thickened so that she cannot hear a single word of it. She feels that same terrible blackness rising within her once more, and she knows she must not let it overwhelm her.

The boy, she thinks. The boy in the photographs. It wasn't Leo. The dates weren't wrong. Uncle Boris had looked old in those pictures because he was old. Not just a great-uncle to the boy but also a grandfather.

‘Excuse me,' Joan whispers, putting up her hand. She does not want to hear any more. She does not need to. She allows Nick to help her to her feet as she stands up and walks out. Her body feels light and insubstantial, as if she is simply evaporating. She goes to the bathroom and closes the door, and then she sits on the side of the bath, gripping the washbasin with her hands and trying to hold herself in.

Quite suddenly, the recollection she was unable to find before is there again, flashing in her mind. Jamie, she thinks. Jamie in the Albert Hall, the last time any of them saw Leo. That was it. She remembers now. Oh, the memory of it thuds in her stomach. During the interval, she and Jamie had stayed in their seats while Sonya and Leo went to get tubs of ice cream from the usherette. ‘Feels like old times,' Joan had said to Jamie, trying to avoid any prolonged discussion of Sonya's pregnancy. ‘Before the war.' And then she had paused. ‘Before you too, I suppose.'

Jamie had grimaced at this. ‘I can't imagine how that worked.'

‘What do you mean?'

He nods towards Leo and Sonya. ‘I mean the three of you. Sonya must have hated it.'

Joan thought for a moment. ‘She wasn't jealous, you know. Leo said.'

Jamie snorted with contempt. ‘Nonsense. She's just good at pretending. She's jealous now.'

‘Is she?'

‘Of course she is. They're as thick as thieves, those two. You need to remember that. Nothing and nobody can come between them. You think you can but you can't.'

‘They're family. They're practically brother and sister.'

Jamie raised his eyebrows. ‘Is that what you call it? They're not like any brother and sister I've ever seen.'

Joan remembers how this had confused her at the time. She recalls how she had looked over to where Leo and Sonya were queuing for ice cream, and had watched as Sonya took Leo's hand and pulled him towards her, placing his palm against her swollen stomach. ‘Wait,' Sonya seemed to instruct him, and he did, even though his body was inclined away from hers and he was not looking at her. They stood like this for nearly a minute, until Leo seemed to start in surprise.

‘There!' Sonya exclaimed, loud enough for Joan to hear. ‘Did you feel it?'

Leo had raised his eyebrows and stepped back, smiling at her and then patting her on the shoulder.

‘See,' Joan had whispered to Jamie. ‘He's just being brotherly.'

‘It's not him, Jo-jo. It's her. She does this every time she sees him. I think she sees it as a sort of substitution because he missed it the other time.'

The other time
? Joan had turned to ask him what he meant but Sonya and Leo had come back over at that point laden with tubs of ice cream, and they had been obliged to change the subject. She had resolved to ask Jamie later after the concert, but there had not been a chance to get a moment alone with him, and then, after Leo died, the conversation had slipped out of her head.

She realises that if this child, Tomas, was born in 1940 as Ms. Hart had said, then that would fit exactly with Sonya's sudden departure for Switzerland in the late summer of 1939, and her period of silence at the beginning of 1940 after her and Leo's ‘clash,' as he put it. Did Sonya know, she wonders, when she took Joan to that horrible woman's house, when she sat by Joan's bedside and nursed her back to health afterwards? Perhaps not. Perhaps that was when she realised that he was not so incorruptible after all. And then the thought strikes her that it must have happened while she was ill.

She remembers Leo's despair over Stalin's pact with Hitler. She can imagine how he might have turned to Sonya then, she being the only one who would really have understood the depth of this betrayal, the only one who had seen what it was like in Germany, how they had suffered, and Leo in particular. Sonya had even warned Joan at the time that she was not being sympathetic enough but Joan had not heeded the warning. She had wanted him to take it in his stride as she had done. She had not understood.

She can imagine how it might have happened. They were not brother and sister; just cousins, yoked together by their past. Sonya might have put her arms around him, comforting and familiar, and he wouldn't have been able to help but feel the smallness of her waist, the nearness of her as she held her face close to his and looked up at him, knowing now that he was not as incorruptible as she had thought.

Joan puts her head in her hands. She cannot believe she has been so blind, so stupid. She remembers the blankness of Sonya's expression when she confronted her about the shirt in her wardrobe. Why had she not pressed her further? Why had she chosen to believe her when she knew she was being lied to? She had known there was something she was not being told, and yet at the same time, she had not wanted to know. Sonya was the only person in the world to whom she thought she could say anything at all, who knew her better than she knew herself. It had seemed too much to lose.

Nick taps on the bathroom door—she recognises the knock—but Joan does not call out for him to come in, nor does she get up. After a pause of a few seconds, he opens the door.

‘Are you okay?'

Joan does not answer. She takes the tissue he offers and blows her nose, and then attempts a smile to show that she is grateful for his presence.

He sits next to her on the side of the bath. ‘I found something while you were in hospital,' he says, brandishing a small pile of papers.

Joan glances at them but does not ask. All she wants is for her son to sit close to her, to put his hand on her shoulder and tell her that she is not alone, that he will stay with her even though he is angry with her. That he will not desert her.

‘I got some help from one of the clerks at Chambers.' He fans the papers out in his hands and holds them out for Joan to see. ‘Marriage certificates for Sonya: one in Zurich in 1953, one in Leipzig in 1957, and one in Russia in 1968. She wasn't easy to find as her name had changed, but we were able to trace someone matching her description through Tomas and Katya. It's impossible to say for certain, but it seems likely that these are her documents. The clerk thinks Jamie ended up in New Zealand.'

Joan looks at them, and sees the pale history of her friend set out in official form. ‘So Sonya made it back to Russia,' she murmurs eventually.

He nods, and holds out another piece of paper.

‘What's this one?'

‘Death certificate. She seems to have died in St. Petersburg in 1982. Twenty-three years ago. I thought you'd want to know.'

‘Oh.' Joan pushes this one away. She does not want to think about Sonya dying.

‘And good riddance,' Nick mutters. ‘After all she did to you. And Leo. Leaving you to rot.'

Joan closes her eyes. She knows she should think this too but right now she cannot find it within her. She is too exhausted by her own pain to hate Sonya as well. She might have done once, for the abortion, for having Leo's baby in secret, for betraying him, but really, what else did she expect? Her mother killed herself by drinking hydrochloric acid. She came from a hard, ruthless place. Is it any wonder she ended up the way she did? Who else was going to look after her?

Nick moves closer to her, not too close, but close enough to lower his voice. ‘Look, I've been thinking. I'm still . . . well . . . angry is putting it mildly.' He pauses. ‘Disappointed, too. I'm not sure that things will ever go back to normal. Between us, I mean.' Another silence. ‘But I've thought about it long and hard and I've decided that I will help you, but you have to do as I say.'

He waits for Joan to respond, and when she doesn't he places his hand firmly between them on the side of the bath. ‘Tell them it was Sonya,' he says. ‘Tell them she did everything. You can work out the logistics later, but it's pretty clear from what you've said that she manipulated you into doing what you did. We can just say you were confused in your original confession, and then everything could be worked to show that Sonya stole the documents from you and radioed them to Russia. It could work to your advantage, actually, that you were so used to being manipulated that you thought you should admit to it.'